Abstract
Although educational timetabling problems have been studied for decades, one instance of this, the school timetabling problem (STP), has not developed as quickly as examination timetabling and course timetabling problems due to its diversity and complexity. In addition, most STP research has only focused on the educators’ availabilities when studying the educator aspect, and the educators’ preferences and expertise have not been taken into consideration. To fill in this gap, this paper proposes a conceptual model for the school timetabling problem considering educators’ availabilities, preferences and expertise as a whole. Based on a common real-world school timetabling scenario, the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is adapted to this study, as research shows its applicability in solving examination and course timetabling problems. A virtual search space for dealing with the large search space is introduced to the proposed model. The proposed approach is simulated with a large, randomly generated dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to solve the STP and handle a large dataset in an ordinary computing hardware environment, which significantly reduces computational costs. Compared to the traditional constraint programming method, the proposed approach is more effective and can provide more satisfactory solutions by considering educators’ availabilities, preferences, and expertise levels.
Highlights
The problem of timetabling can be defined as a computational problem that allocates resources in given periods under particular constraints to achieve desirable goals [1].Educational timetabling is one of the fundamental tasks affecting educational institutes’operations and productions
Based on the chosen scenario, this paper presents a model of the school timetabling problem (STP) and proposes a modified artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to solve the problem
The results of time spent in program execution, the number of unallocated classes conceptual model of the STP and introduced a novel VSS method to reduce the searching and the objective function value will be compared
Summary
The problem of timetabling can be defined as a computational problem that allocates resources in given periods under particular constraints to achieve desirable goals [1]. Most STP research has only focused on educators’ availabilities when they studied the educator aspect [7,32], and the attributes of educators’ preferences and expertise were not taken into consideration To address this issue, this paper chooses a common real-world school timetabling scenario to study and takes educators’ preferences towards units ( known as “courses” in some literature) and the corresponding expertise level into account. Based on the chosen scenario, this paper presents a model of the STP and proposes a modified ABC algorithm to solve the problem. The contributions of this research include a conceptual model and its mathematical formulation for the STP, considering educators’ availabilities, preferences and expertise as a whole; a novel VSS method for reducing the computational cost of handling a large searching space; and a modified ABC algorithm to solve the proposed STP model.
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